Security of a mobile device, security information and private information of a user stored locally within or accessible by a mobile device (e.g., a mobile phone, a mobile media player, a tablet computer, an Apple® iPhone®, an Apple® iPad®, a Google® Nexus S®, a HTC® Droid® etc.) may be of concern to a user of a mobile device. Furthermore, the user may utilize the mobile device in manner similar to a personal computer (e.g., browse the Internet, access email, access personal financial information, post on a social-media website etc.). Consequently, the mobile device may include confidential information and user security information (e.g., a web browser history, a usernames and a password, an email account, a past call history, a text message, a user-name, a password, a voice message, etc.). Due to the nature of this type of information, a security breach may be costly to the user or his/her organization (e.g., a difficulty in recreating lost information, a lost subject matter, a loss of a trade secret, a breach of personal and/or corporate privacy, etc.).
A design of the mobile device may make it problematic to implement an additional security protocol. For example, the mobile device may utilize a touch screen (e.g., a display which can detect a location of patterns in a display area) for user input rather than a physical keypad. The user may be able to access the mobile device utilizing the touch screen simply by tapping a surface of the touch screen in an arbitrary manner and/or performing a templated gesture (e.g., a pattern such as movement from left to right) on a surface of the touch screen. As a result, confidential information may be accessed by anyone merely in physical possession of the mobile device.
The touch screen mobile device may include a virtual keypad (e.g., a form of a template to guide the user, an alpha-numeric virtual key pad, etc.). The user may use the virtual keypad to enter a pass code to access information. This process may be slow and/or cumbersome (e.g., a fingertip of the user may be of comparatively same size as an area of a virtual keypad symbol, the virtual keypad may not have the same tactile feel as the physical keypad, etc.). Use of a virtual keypad may also be inconvenient and/or dangerous when an attention of the user is diverted (e.g., walking, working, eating, etc.). A handicapped user (e.g., a sight-impaired person, a person without fingers or hands, a person with impaired dexterity, etc.) may have difficulty inputting information with the virtual keypad. Furthermore, the alpha-numeric pass code may be difficult to remember for a primary user and/or secondary users of the mobile device. Thus, security of the mobile device may be breached resulting in theft and/or misappropriation of the confidential information that may be stored in the mobile device. Furthermore, it may be cumbersome to sequentially enter a series of different alphanumeric user names and passwords in order to expediently gain access to multiple related restricted remote resources (such as a collection of social networking websites).
The use of gesturing technology for a mobile device may provide a mechanism by which a user of the mobile device may be able to grant or prevent access to the mobile device. Typically, a tactile security gesture that may grant or prevent access to a mobile device is stored locally within the mobile device (e.g., on a hard disk and/or on a memory chip within the mobile device). This may provide a minimal level of protection for a user of a mobile device.
However, a loss, theft, or destruction of a mobile device may necessarily mean a total loss of access to the information and data stored locally within the mobile device in addition to the tactile security gesture and other “log-in” information consisting of private user-identifying data such as user-names and passwords, also stored locally in the mobile device. In addition, a technology based on a locally-stored security gesture that may only grant or deny access to a single mobile device for a single user may make it very cumbersome for a user of a mobile device to access information and data stored on other mobile devices or on other data resources requiring user authentication (e.g., an Internet site in a public web, a password protected website, a social networking website, etc.).